Susan Ettenheim

Teachers are learners at heart. We’ve got full time jobs, rooms full of hormonally-driven teens, stacks of papers to grade – yet we still find time to write and to learn ourselves. On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we hear from two inspirational teachers, Donovan Hohn and Alice Barr.

Donovan Hohn’s
writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and The Moby Duck Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2. A former New York City English teacher, he is now the features editor of GQ. He lives in New York with his wife and sons. You may have heard his interview with Terry Gross on NPR on March 29, 2011, where he talked about his experiences writing his first book, Moby Duck.

Alice Barr, our colleague at Seedlings, is the Instructional Technology Coordinator at Yarmouth High School, Yarmouth, Maine, a Google Certified Teacher and Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Maine. She mentors faculty and students on 1:1 laptop integration and is network administrator and webmaster. People ask her all the time what’s available this summer and she wanted to share her own upcoming courses so she launched and twittered a Summer 2011 PD Opportunities page that has already become an amazing shared resource as we begin to think about upcoming opportunities to learn something new or share what we have learned. Add your plans at http://alicebarr.blogspot.com/p/summer-2011-professional-development.html

Enjoy this conversation!

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Our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers suggest our topic, or perhaps it would be better to say, our questions. It seemed to us that a teacher from West Virginia, near last year's Massey Mine Disaster, would have something to say to a teacher from Louisiana who lives not far from the BP Oil Spill. And both of these teachers might have something to say to teachers who live near Tokyo, south of TEPCO's damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power plant. It has been our goal on Teachers Teaching Teachers to understand these crises through the eyes of our colleagues and their students whose lives are most immediately impacted. Thanks to our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we might better understand how and why it is important to bring these stories to our students.

Laura Kriska, writer of The Accidental Office Lady, Laura is an intercultural consultant, and she just started a website, Cherry Blossom Letters "for American kids here to make art and write letters and then send them in
packages to Second Harvest, a nonprofit aid organization in Japan. Second Harvest makes daily trips to the impacted region and will deliver our packages directly to people in shelters."

The introductions are pretty interesting on their own, but we hope you take the time to listen to the entire conversation!

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After inviting his principal, the founding principal of East-West, Ben Sherman onto this episode of TTT, Paul asked Ben who he knows in Japan who we could invite into the conversation. Ben immediately thought of Alan Bergman "a guy that I went to grad school with in Tokyo." Alan who teaches at a university in Tokyo, in turn, put us in touch with Eric Bossieux, providing us with this introduction:

Eric is originally from Louisiana. His father was a pilot with Japan Airlines, so Eric went to international high school in Yokohama and to Sophia University in Tokyo. He does consulting and translation work, and he has done translations for TEPCO (the company that runs the reactor in Fukushima) of their operating manuals for hydroelectric and nuclear power plants.

Rounding out this list of guests are two students, seniors from East-West, Martha and Christian.

We plan to continue to talk about these issues, questions, assessments
of the situation, and ways we can help. What can we learn and teach now
and in the future about the Great Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011?

48:07 minutes (11.01 MB)
On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers Renee Hobbs discusses her white paper, “Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action,” published in November 2010. You will enjoy this podcast if, like Renee, you have had
enough of “gee-wiz” gaping over new technology tools.” In her work, Renee seeks to identify and support projects and communities (perhaps like yours) where educators are shifting towards “a focus on critical thinking and communication skills” (xii Digital and Media Literacy). On this podcast you'll hear what Renee’s plan of action is all about. Let’s put ourselves on the map of existing resources as well following up on these other recommendations from the Executive Summary:

Support Community-Level Digital and Media Literacy Initiatives

1.
Map existing community resources and offer small grants to promote community partnerships to integrate digital and media literacy competencies into existing programs.
2. Support a national network of summer learning programs to integrate digital and media literacy into public charter schools.

3. Support a Digital and Media Literacy (DML) Youth Corps to bring digital and media literacy to under-served communities and special populations via public libraries, museums and other community centers.

Develop Partnerships for Teacher Education

4. Support interdisciplinary bridge building in higher education to integrate core principles of digital and media literacy education into teacher preparation programs.
5. Create district-level initiatives that support digital and media literacy across K–12 via community and media partnerships.
6.
Partner with media and technology companies to bring local and national news media more fully into education programs in ways that promote civic engagement.

8.Engage the entertainment industry’s creative community in an entertainment-education initiative to raise visibility and create shared social norms regarding ethical behaviors in using online social media.

9. Host a statewide youth-produced Public Service Announcement (PSA) competition to increase visibility for digital and media literacy education.
10. Support an annual conference and educator showcase competition in Washington, D.C. to increase national leadership in digital and media literacy education.

There’s so much here! We hope that you will find ways to join this movement and add to the networks for digital and media literacy with Renee Hobbs, founder of the Media Education Lab:

Renee Hobbs is one of the leading authorities on media literacy education in the United States. She is a Professor at the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia and holds a joint appointment at the College of Education. She founded the Media Education Lab in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media. She has written dozens of scholarly articles, created multimedia curriculum resources and offered professional development programs on four continents to advance the quality of media literacy education in the United States and around the world.

Please enjoy the conversation!

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Several leaders in the National Writing Project--Paul Oh, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks--joined us from Washington DC where
they were working to lobby members of Congress today, Thursday, March 31.

Also Chad Sansing, Zac Chase, and Andrea Zellner joined us on the Skype conversation--as well as many friends in the chat. Chad has been organizing a
blogging effort going on around the country. Here’s what he is asking
supporters of the NWP to do:

Please add your voice to the chorus of educators from around the country who are blogging in support of the NWP.
We’re trying to accumulate 1,000 blog posts by April 8, when the next
Continuing Resolution for the federal budget expires. There are already
nearly 150 posts - moving stories of the impact of the NWP on the lives
of teachers and students - at the archive: http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/the-blog4nwp-archive/ You can tweet or email your blog post URL to Chad Sansing (twitter: @chadsansing; email: csansing@gmail.com)
who has been organizing this effort, or post it to this discussion and
we’ll make sure it gets added to the archive. Remember to try to tag
your posts with: #blog4nwp. FYI, we’ve gotten a few responses on
twitter to this effort from the press office of the Department of
Education (see: http://www.andrea-zellner.com/archives/629 and http://aetweets.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/blog4nwp-and-being-bossy/), so let’s keep it up!
Check out what folks have written to get an idea of what you might add
but more importantly take a few minutes to add your story (stories).

Listen to find out what we can do to help restore funding to the National Writing
Project. Then find your own ways to add your voice the the the chorus singing praises to the
National Writing Project!

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